Mega Jaws, “The Black Demon…”

— Hmm…you go looking for a megalodon, and find…a whale shark! Somehow, the thrill is gone…

MonsterQuest went in search of a surviving megalodon shark in the Sea of Cortez in a recent offering, seeking also to better date a megalodon tooth specimen found by the HMS Challenger and estimated in 1959 to be about 10,000 years old.–Surprise! The tooth was judged not to be datable by modern scientific methods…bummer!

Now since sharks lack bones, most of what we know about extinct species comes from their teeth, with paleontologists estimating ten feet of shark for every inch of tooth. By such calculation, megalodon measured up to 50 feet long, weighed up to 50 tons, and was two to three times larger than today’s great white shark. This bad boy lived during the Miocene and Pliocene Eras, 25 to 5 million years ago.–What did they eat?–anything they wanted to, but probably seals at the small end of the scale to giant squid, other sharks, and whales…truly an apex predator!

MonsterQuest felt that most of the sightings is the area were misidentifications of whale sharks, who are just filter feeders. Some feel that MonsterQuest would have had better luck locating a megalodon in the Marianas Trench area…

6 Comments on “Mega Jaws, “The Black Demon…””

Seriously, though: the first time I heard that theory was in the Steven Alten novel, MEG? Good read; although the sequels are a little lackluster.

As for this episode, itself? It’s one of those schedule-filling repeats; usually shown in marathons while new episodes are being produced and edited. Still, I wish they’d start looking into other cryptids, like the Swiss tazelwurm; or, the South American iemische (sic?); or even the Nandi Bear of Central/East Africa!